"Disappearing Ohio Butterflies Affects All Insects"

Question

by Vicky Stein

For my 11th birthday, I received a perfect, weird, road-trip amusement: a book filled with pictures and descriptions to help kids decode the splatters of insects that smacked into the front of a moving vehicle. Whether that sounds like macabre fun or makes you grumble about keeping the windshield clean, a steep decline in reported bug splatters in recent years should actually make us worried, entomologists and ecologists say.

In a new study published Tuesday in PLOS ONE, a group of researchers analyzed one of the rare data sets that tracks butterfly abundance, taken from 21 years of volunteer surveys in Ohio. They found an average population decline of 2 percent per year, which means that over the course of the study, Ohio lost more than a third of its butterfly population.

Some species of butterflies showed no change in abundance, however, and a few others actually became more common.

“Not everything is going to decline in exactly the same way,” said Corrie Moreau, an entomologist and evolutionary biologist from Cornell University who was not involved in the new research. “But we are seeing, in this study and others, that insects are in a rapid fall.”

Plenty of drivers tell stories about suspiciously clean windshields, and bikers have noted that they’re much less likely these days to swallow a bug while on a ride. Articles decrying a coming “insect apocalypse” have been popping up across news platforms like the New York Times Magazine and National Geographic. The Guardian claimed that the estimated rate of decline meant that insects, as a whole, could go extinct within a century.

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Question
Use the excerpt from “Butterflies are disappearing in Ohio. Here’s what that means for insects everywhere” to answer the question.
Why does the author talk about windshields in the last paragraph? Select the two correct answers.(1 point)
Responses

to offer evidence that insect populations have declined
to offer evidence that insect populations have declined

to refer to an idea from paragraph 1
to refer to an idea from paragraph 1

to suggest that people cannot trust news sources
to suggest that people cannot trust news sources

to argue that there is too little known about insect populations
to argue that there is too little known about insect populations

to dispute a claim from paragraph 2

Answer 1

The author talks about windshields in the last paragraph for the following two reasons:

1. to offer evidence that insect populations have declined - The mention of clean windshields serves as anecdotal evidence pointing to a decrease in the number of insects, supporting the broader claim of insect population declines.

2. to refer to an idea from paragraph 1 - The reference to how drivers and bikers have noticed fewer insect splatters ties back to the initial discussion in paragraph 1 about the decline in bug splatters, reinforcing the theme introduced earlier in the piece.